Tom Ritchford
2 min readApr 27, 2021

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Your argument falls down in several places.

The main one is this - "people die all the time" is not a refutation to "Here's a new cause of death that's killing people."

About ten thousand Americans die every day. Would you buy the argument that 9/11 was just another cause of death and thus should be ignored? Or, if you knew about 9/11 beforehand, that it wouldn't be worth stopping because it's less than eight hours worth of death?

The second argument is that for every one person whom COVID killed, ten have long term consequences. I have a couple of long-haulers in my social circle and both of them were healthy men under 40.

The third argument is that if we hadn't take the precautions we did, it would have been a lot worse. What you really, really want to avoid happening is for your medical system to break down because there are too many patients right now. If that happens, a lot of people whom under normal circumstances would survive, will die because you can't get them medial attention.

More, once you've broken your hospitals, they won't just bounce back. That means you've killed a lot of your doctors and nurses and turned hospital wards into charnel houses.

Infectious diseases are not like cancer. We have seen over history the consequences of unchecked epidemics. This one killed over three million despite heroic efforts. And we were very lucky.

The final argument is that on the average, each COVID death killed someone sixteen years earlier than they would have.

So that's 50 million years of healthy life robbed from us as humans.

Please reconsider your stance, for which you don't really offer any substantive argument except "People die."

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